JOAN RYAN -- Be All That You Can Be (and Never Forget to Smile) / Sorry, folks, but they've put the bikinis back in the pageants, and yes, we've still got a long way to go, baby.

JOAN RYAN

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, September 21, 1997

The Miss America Pageant has always reminded me of a sophisticated 4-H project ("Prized female humans! Judging at 9 p.m.!"). I didn't watch the pageant last Saturday night, though had I been at home with nothing to do, I probably would have tuned in. There is a certain sick entertainment value to it, especially the question portion.

"If you had one wish, what would it be?" the interviewer asks.

"If I had one wish," the contestant repeats (buying time to formulate a really super answer), "I would wish for peace throughout the world, ours and everyone else's!"

"What a wonderful answer!"

Or: "Who were your heroes growing up?"

"My heroes growing up were my parents," she says with a nursery- school-teacher tilt of the head. "They instilled in me the belief that girls could be anything they wanted to be -- brain surgeon, rocket scientist, president. They're the reason I'm here today in Spandex and stiletto heels, pursuing a lifelong dream of being the prettiest girl ever!"

"What a wonderful answer!"

Once upon a time, feminists protested the pageant. They said it reinforced the stereotype of women as empty-headed showpieces. Now, though, we understand there are more pressing problems for women than a one-night parade of Barbies. So I -- and some of my female friends -- were surprised to find our teeth starting to hurt as we saw promos for the pageant. None of us could explain exactly why it annoyed us, especially since the event seems to be dying a slow death. The introduction of bikinis, for example, was a tip-off to the pageant's desperation. TV ratings have been dropping -- last year's were the lowest ever. Young girls don't seem to be watching the way we did as kids. The Stepford-Wife contestants are like aliens to today's black-fingernailed teenagers.

Yet its mere existence still managed to grate on me in a vague, unarticulated way. Then as I watched the 49ers last Sunday, an answer began to take shape. It occurred to me as I looked at football broadcasters Pat Summerall and John Madden that a woman who looked like them would be barred from every TV studio in the country. Television, the looking-glass of a culture's values, does not tolerate ugly women, except as clowns (Imogene Coca and Roseanne come to mind). Dan Rather and Charles Kuralt, Chris Berman and Al Roker can get jobs in broadcasting despite their looks. But no matter how brilliant a newswoman might be, if she looked like Eleanor Roosevelt she would be relegated to producing. At least, I told myself, there are plenty of TV role models for girls beyond beauty queens. Then I saw the fall lineup. Of 30 new prime- time shows, 26 feature men as the focal point. Almost no dramas are centered on women. As one TV critic wrote, "The indirect message through sheer collective weight of the numbers is that viewers needn't take females as seriously as males."

And even women newsmakers -- politicians, in particular -- are expected to be attractive. Stand-up comics regularly ridicule Janet Reno's looks. Even Chelsea Clinton, just an awkward kid, was the butt of jokes when she arrived in the White House.

When 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was murdered, we were appalled at the pictures of her competing in beauty pageants. She was tarted up and paraded out as if she were a thing instead of a person. The whole idea of the Little Miss pageants seemed not only degrading but inane. Who could possibly care who's the prettiest little girl in Akron or Colorado Springs or the United States?

Which begs a question: If we think pageants are so silly for girls at age 6, aren't they even sillier for grown women of 18 and 20?

Perhaps Miss America is part of a quaint, old-fashioned idea of women that carries no weight in today's liberated world. I don't know. A friend was telling me about a 13- year-old girl she knows who can chart the hierarchy among her junior high classmates as if they held military rank. She described the different reasons certain kids made it up to the highest rung -- wit, wealth, charm. But for girls, there was one currency that never failed to buy a spot at the most coveted lunch table: beauty. They could be dumb as stones. It didn't matter as long as they were beautiful.

We know that bulimia and anorexia are still plagues among young women. Older women turn to plastic surgery, enduring risk and pain for larger breasts and thinner thighs. Fashion models are now superstars, attracting intense admiration for nothing more than being thin and pretty.

After more than 30 years of feminism, Americans have been trained to say that we value the same attributes in women that we do in men. But we're like a family trying to convince everyone we've moved beyond our hillbilly roots. We've got the Chippendale tables, the Lexus in the garage, the European kitchen fixtures. But somebody forgot to take the pink flamingos off the lawn.

Miss America is like a pink flamingo on America's lawn, exposing us for what we still are.